Artprice Exclusive - Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi at the Louvre Abu Dhabi is likely the result of a geopolitical mediation,

Vendredi 08 Déc 2017 à 18:35

Artprice Exclusive - Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi at the Louvre Abu Dhabi is likely the result of a geopolitical mediation, involving Anglo-Saxon funds, firewalls and Mohammad Bin Salman -the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia-, which curbed its price. Insurance fees for a public exhibition are estimated at 700 million dollars approximately. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the United Arab Emirates, broke off all diplomatic ties with Qatar after in the last few years in the Gulf region, Qatar had established its leadership on the Art Market with the Qatar Museum Authority (Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani).

Having provided an exclusive explanation of the sophisticated FINANCIAL arrangements behind the recent acquisition of Leonardo Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi–an explanation that was picked up by Agence France Presse today–, Artprice has highlighted a highly sophisticated economic model.

The arrangements for the acquisition of the Da Vinci masterpiece correspond perfectly to the Museum Industry® model that Artprice conceptualized in 2005 and has taught ever since.

According to thierry Ehrmann, All the of the world's major museums hold accounts with Artprice, including of course the Louvre. The United Arab Emirates, with its capital Abu Dhabi, is one of the top 10 most active countries accessing Artprice's databases...”

Here's the deal: the Paris Louvre sells a “Louvre” franchise to Abu Dhabi until 2037. The latter pays a total of 400 million euros to the Paris Louvre for the right to use the Louvre name. The latter, accompanied by 13 French museums, convenants to lend artworks to Abu Dhabi – 10 museums have already lent more than 350 artworks.

These arrangements shows the Museum Industry® collaborating within a network, using investment vehicles and complex legal structures.

They unambiguously prove the emergence in the twenty-first century of a new economic sector – the Museum Industry® – exactly as Artprice described it back in 2005.

In short, we have a classic business model with inflows (ticketing and derivative income) and outflows – operating license costs plus acquisition costs… in this case, the price of Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi, a price predicted by Artprice three months prior to its sale.

The 450 million dollars paid for the painting is the result of an intelligent investment decision based on the Louvre museum's annual operating income (ebitda) and not on some wild extravagance. Those who believe it is the latter have failed to understand that the Museum Industry® is now the principal structure of the global art market.

This structure is driving art prices up by creating scarcity on the three principal segments of the Art Market: Old Masters, Modern Art and Contemporary Art, and we see that within this industry configuration, the resale of a “major tangible asset” can have an immediate impact on ticket revenue.

Artprice – which will be launching its own museum ranking index (Artmuseum100®) in early 2018 – highlights the transformation of museums, whose clientele has grown tenfold in the last 30 years.

Artprice and its econometrics department has been collaborating with Twitter for two years on a giant sample of 39 million identified followers with links to the world's 100 principal Fine Art museums.

According to thierry Ehrmann, This massive expansion of the global Museum Industry® goes hand-in-hand with a major soft-power competition between the world's nations, particularly its major powers (China / US) and the Gulf States. Indeed, soft-power rivalry is leading the art market inexorably towards spectacular new auction results. In our well-documented view, we are likely to see results around the billion dollar threshold by 2020.

As the world leader in Art Market information, Artprice can only benefit from this growth of the Art Market, driven essentially by the increasing power of the Museum Industry®.

Artprice is listed on the Eurolist by Euronext Paris, srd long only and Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF.

Artprice is the global leader in art price and art index databanks. It has over 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 700,000 artists. Artprice Images(R) gives unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world: a library of 126 million images or prints of artworks from the year 1700 to the present day, along with comments by Artprice's art historians.

Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 6,300 auctioneers and it publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the world's principal news agencies and approximately 7,200 international press publications. For its 4,500,000 members, Artprice gives access to the world's leading Standardised Marketplace for buying and selling art. Artprice is preparing its blockchain for the Art Market. It is BPI-labelled (scientific national French label).

The text presented hereafter is a translation of Arte Creative's online presentation: ARTE: A gigantic Christmas tree in the guise of a butt plug, a machine that defecates five-star meals, an icon immersed in urine and staged corpses - subversive, trash, provocative or insulting? Thierry Ehrmann, the man behind The Abode of Chaos dixit "The New York Times", an artist and the founder of Artprice, is the mouthpiece for scandal and discloses the workings of the most striking controversies in contemporary art. And scandal sells. 9 episodes are online: http://www.arte.tv/guide/en/weekly-highlight